A poem I wrote at yoga

i like to find
i've opened time
and made it big
so it doesn't matter 
anymore

i like to hear
the clamor clear
and really start
to listen

i like to hope
beyond hope
that after this
there is a this
still to be

but then again
i start to sin
and stumble

which is when
i like to find
i've opened time
and made it big
so it doesn't matter 
anymore

Writing

I tried to write a novel and it didn’t work out so I let flow more naturally the style you’re reading now. I started writing on my phone in the streets. Something tells me this requires less talent, but maybe talent was only a selfish aim.

Words

Words each have their meaning all on their own, so much so that a sentence all out of order which most people would say doesn’t make sense still makes sense in some way, just maybe not in a way you’ve thought of before.

Samely, each letter has a meaning, especially its sound. And so I could create a word that does not exist in the English language, and you would say that is not a word. But already you are associating it with words that sound like it and have letters in common. And further, when I start to use it consistently in the same particular contexts then you would build up a memory of that word and you would understand the situations in which I was using it and so you could even start using that word.

It is because this is my theory of language that I have included so much nonsense in this book. because there are unusual corners and undiscovered lands of our language which represent parts of you mind that you didn’t know existed. This book seeks to guide you into those new parts of your own mind.

Curiosity

How odd would everything seem if we weren’t conditioned for survival. Everything would just be, without all the human-centric judgments that we assign. A plant is green because that’s the way human eyes take in that light on the frequency spectrum. A plant is food because we humans need to eat. A plant, the very word “plant,” is what we decided to call it. But is a plant any of this objectively and apart from us? The world is as we define it; we define it because we need to; we need because we must survive. But what if we didn’t need to survive, then everything would just be. Presumably the world would still be dynamic, but without one change better than any other. And then I think the prime value would be curiosity.

Suicide

I think about dying. When I’m really sleepy, I think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But there is still potential for pleasure. Even the pain I don’t mind because I know it is like dark to the light pleasure. It must have its opposite. Which is why it is when I am sleepy that death seems alright. I am not satisfied nor do I seek satisfaction, I am depleted, ready for the dark and quite for a little while. Buddha sought to escape suffering. Where there is craving there is suffering, he said. So he reached nirvana and no longer craved and therefore no longer suffered. I tried this once. When I couldn’t taste. And I walked alone at night. I decided I prefer the craving, and the suffering is not too expensive a price for pleasure. I stay alive because I am hungry, I live for the satiation. On the flatline I do not rise. I rise on the widening amplitudes of my undulations.

Flick and swish

flick of the swish in the faded dark

cultivate the spark, please

please kindle and huddle and burn and stretch out into the absence of you

stretch out little flame

Death poetry

I walked a witch away

dark days they say

not so dark I say

when you don’t know up is which way

death is a dare

say jump and I might

say jumped and I did

Of it

It is of it that we are, though we needn’t be, for it always was, even before us, anyhow.

Milkshake and salad

Like you’ll suck up all the good but put your head down and rush through the bad. But the bad makes the good, so like the last few drops you search for and slowly suck out of the milkshake, do the same with the final leaves in your salad; or like you exhale in your bed at night and focus on the relaxation until sleep, do the same with your work, welcoming and slowly feeling the pain that is soil for pleasure to grow.

English and music

I write to live and live to write. My experience can be coded, transcribed, recorded, replayed, in many differently languages. I chose English because that is what was arbitrarily taught to me by my time and place, I am trying to teach myself music for the same reason, because I love a story in song.

Balance

For me it is the balance, I return from the chaos of travel to the order of home, and it is then I write my most, creativity meets logic.

What you know

I sit down to write and I can only write myself: the Writer. I suppose this is because I am only an amateur writer, or maybe because I am selfish, or maybe I am afraid to fail because my empathic abilities are weak.

Morning dreams

There are two worlds on either side of the line that divides sleep and wake in those early morning hours when you cannot tell which is which, when figments drift over to the real bedroom and the clock from your nightstand dances in between dreams.

Her reality

It begins with a building up of potential and power: flowing up from the earth through the palms of your feet and from another soul through their eyes and into yours.

Learning to hold potential realities, your mind fills with experience: your whole being swells with the reality that flows in through the senses. It grows within you and wants to get out and return to the rest of reality, but you must hold it, letting it fill and stretch your bounds.

The reality you hold enters its own home; you carry Her like a welcome guest. The energy exists in the physical space, all that remains to be seen is whether it will exist within your gates for just a little while longer before returning to the wider bounds. It grows as reality pours in through your eyes, ears, and skin.

Together with reality, taking mutual pleasure that it is held within you but also at the same time within Her, breaking down economic laws that one good cannot be possessed at once by two. The simultaneous ownership is symbiotic, and the swelling grows within the inner gates while reality, hospitable to Her guest, expands Her widest bounds.

Reality delights in the creative friction where you rub on the edges of the world, pressing against its walls, borders and exactitude to stretch its limits and let it unfold for you. Her walls, laws and rules bend around you.

Drunk with pleasure there is the temptation to overflow before reaching the high spiritual and deep physical. Or there is the temptation to lose focus and slowly shrink. Yet you endure, skeptical of both your limits and reality’s bounds.

Alas, the king is not foolish to keep within his own gates what has grown from resources imported from the outside; he is a vessel for reality, a traveler in the realm of power and creative ecstasy. When he has built up his kingdom to the perceived limits and can endure no longer he allows his gates to open and flood the countryside and even the deepest valleys with a river of wealth.

He releases his power and hugs tightly to his People, for they are now inextricably linked like a family. If he is still young, he will rest to regain his strength, then set out to be filled with reality and swell up again, using the residual power of his last creation—knowledge of principles, strength of body, and awareness of spirituality—to build up his next kingdom even greater than the last, until he is buried beneath his magnum opus.

A typo in Genesis

And you see I don’t see, not because I tell you so but because we don’t fisticuff tonight.

What is it then to fall so far if only far so fell?

I really tried to dot my i’s and cross my t’s.

‘Earth’ is art hugged by an ‘eh.’

There’s a typo in Genesis.

When God made the world he did not say ‘very good.’ He said ‘eh.’

Man is just man. Human is love.

For me, art is feeling. Not in the creator alone or the onlooker alone, but together between the two, and from this comes a third. Like the Trinity, or the family. Not mine or yours, but ours. Your worldview perceiving my worldview and creating a third. I find meaning in that third creation. Which is why I suppose God said ‘eh’ when he first created the world. But surely he later said it was ‘very good’ when he entered into love with us, and thus the third creation, which could only follow from man’s second.

For her, art is a physical expression of all the experiences that have shaped her identity.

For me, art is experiencing Her.

Interdependent (or, Art and Love; orr, Us)

Rand says, you must first say the ‘I’ before ‘I love you.’

There must be two ones, ‘fore two become one.

In the morning, she peels an orange. And separates me a slice.

It has been a few months since I was last alone. I am feeling better.

Agreeable bedfellows: fruit and morning, I think behind my eyes closed tight against the light.

“How’d you sleep?”

“I didn’t,” she breathes through a mouthful of orange.

I push myself up on my elbows.

“Why not?” I ask concerned.

“You were occupying the dream space,” she smiles sheepishly, pretending to be human.

“I was what?”

She peels an orange, tells me she shares dreams with her bedfellows.

Last summer oranges were only wet.

I found myself “out there”—in others, in nature. It is in me actually it seems, but doors within me to which only outside things hold the keys.

“What on earth are you doing out here in the cold without your coat?”

Shivering, cupping her coffee, she looks up out of a trance and smiles.

“I’m writing,” she says simply.

“What,” I begin to stutter an objection.

She smiles at my misunderstanding and raises her index finger to tap twice her temple.

“Oh,” I whisper.

I was in a holy place.

So I took off my coat and sat next to her.

There must be at least one on either side. One cannot be dependent on nothing.

Dependent on oneself at least—but I learned this was not enough. Happy at least those years of self-reflection were not a waste.

I searched for meaning and rightness but the truth is I feel alive when I’m with you and if we’re godless then I care much more to be with you than to be right. And if you don’t hear my logic I’ll learn to speak music.

Independent (or, Philosophy; orr, I)

Sartre says, man first exists, encounters himself, then surges up. But he leaves out intermediaries. First man exists, yes—but in what sense? Then he encounters them, not yet himself—necessary; we would die very young without them.

The true test is a secondary non-existence, to walk into the woods, physically a grown man, but nothing in any other sense, and say to Her, “Mother Earth, am I you, or am I?”

Only thereafter can he surge up and define himself.

I took religion’s truth condition to philosophy, still ignorant of art—the true untruth.

I read Thoreau and thought I could make myself. I tried to scrub my nurture, and get at a raw starting point for rational existence.

I lost my mind in New York.

My hands gripped either side of the sink. I looked in the mirror over his shoulder at me.

6 a.m. on the subway. My wristwatch tapping on the rail.

Lunch break, in the windowed ground floor of skyscrapers, when the sun catches it just right I can see my Form morph into its potentials.

Blades of grass kept me alive that summer.

True meta is particular. A whole universe in an Adam’s apple. Size matters, relatively.

I thumb an almond. They say you can’t know even a fruit fly. The skin peels from its body, sticks to my teeth, and I feel what I don’t know. It becomes me and knowing matters less.

I learned it from the jabber worldly and the losiphizers who couldn’t tell me why.

Because it’s muddle mush: why use their language if we don’t follow their rules? How far beyond the golos before sapoth too can’t hear me?

Always search for meaning but sometimes neaming isn’t what we need, sometimes the call to our deeper selves uses sounds uncombined into dictionary words.

Then I discovered art.